Chris Beckett - Dark Eden

‘Drains were like streams underneath every shelter,’ Stoop said. ‘They’d wash all your piss and shit away, into a pool as big as Greatpool, covered with a roof of stone.’

‘Planes were a kind of bird made of metal,’ Mitch said.

‘Trains were long thin shelters that slid along a smooth metal path,’ said Gela, ‘so you could go to sleep in one bit of a forest and wake up in another.’

They were flagging now, and the group leaders began to prompt them with other things to say.

‘What about hosples where they made you well?’ whispered Mary Starflower.

‘What about those clones with their big feet and their red noses?’ murmured Susan Blueside.

‘What about money?’ prompted Tom Brooklyn.

‘Ah,’ said old Gela, ‘money was numbers you held in your head.’

‘You could trade them for things you wanted,’ said Mitch.

Trade things for numbers in other people’s heads? Nobody’d ever understood what that meant, but Oldest spoke about it at every Any Virsry, as if a waking would come when someone would jump up and yell out, ‘Yes of course! Of course! I’ve figured it out now! I know how that worked!’

What was the point of saying words if we didn’t know what they meant? We were like blind people pretending to see.

But they say that even Tommy and Angela themselves didn’t understand how Lecky-trickity worked or how you made the Single Force. They didn’t even know where metal was to be found, or how to get it out of the stone it was mixed with, except that you had to heat it with fire.

Littles got hungry and started to grizzle and cry. Newhairs giggled and whispered and pinched each other, and Oldest themselves, who’d started off so excited that they couldn’t bear to let each other finish what they had to say, got too tired to carry on. In fact they were so drained and pale and wobbly all of a sudden that they looked like they might die right there in front of us in their precious Circle of Stones. They had to be helped to step back and sit down and wrap up with skins and be given stuff to drink. And then Caroline and Council and Oldest and helpers got out of the way, and in came Big Sky-Boat, and everyone cheered and clapped and laughed.

It was time for the Show, and it was Brooklyn’s turn to do it. A whole bunch of them were carrying that great silly wooden thing that was supposed to be the starship Defiant . It was three times the length of a normal boat, and not quite straight. It had poles sticking up from it to hold up a wobbly bark roof like the roof of a shelter, and long branches sticking out of its sides for people to carry it with. It even had another little boat inside it, which was supposed to be the Landing Veekle. And crammed in, at the front and back, were the Three Disobedient Men, laughing and waving to us.

Of course Big Sky-Boat was tiny tiny compared with the real Defiant . The real starship was longer than Greatpool, and so big that if it ever came down to the ground it would never get back up again into sky. (Even the real Landing Veekle was the size of Circle of Stones, and it was carried inside of Defiant .) But all the same our silly little Big Sky-Boat still looked stupidly big compared to the little log boats that we used to fish on Greatpool and Longpool, and it had so much stuff on top of it that anyone could see that it would have toppled over straight away if you actually put it in water. Plus, with that curve in middle of it, there was no way you could have paddled it straight.

But of course Big Sky-Boat never did get put in water. It was carried every Any Virsry by a bunch of people holding the ends of three strong branches that were stuck through holes in its sides. Those three grinning Brooklyn men inside it were supposed to be Tommy Schneider, our first father, from whose dick came every one of us, and his two friends Dixon Thorleye and Mehmet Haribey. They were setting out from Earth into Starry Swirl, as calmly and cheerfully as if they were just going fishing out on Greatpool. Tommy’s face had white wood-ash mixed with buckfat smeared over it, to show that he had white skin.

‘Let’s go further out,’ says Dixon, when they’re getting near the edge of Circle of Stones.

‘No, we shouldn’t,’ says Tommy. ‘Earth Family doesn’t want us to do that, do they?’

‘Yeah,’ says Mehmet, ‘and this Sky-Boat belongs to everyone, remember, not just to us.’

It was said that it took thousands of hundreds of people to build Defiant , and take it up to sky in pieces, and to put it together up there. It took thousands of people all across Earth to find the metal and plastic and everything else they needed in the rocks, and thousands more to get it out and carry it to where it was needed. All Earth was part of the work, which took hundreds or thousands of wombtimes.

‘I mean,’ says Mehmet, ‘it’s not like we made it ourselves.’

‘True,’ says Tommy, looking serious serious. But then he smiles and looks out at the people all around the clearing: in front of him, behind, left, right.

‘Should we do it, kids?’ he calls out. ‘Should we go further out?’

‘No! No! Don’t do it!’ yell all the kids in Family, laughing and squealing with delight.

‘Yeah but why not?’ says Dixon. ‘It won’t hurt anyone. And anyway, I feel that it’s what Jesus wants us to do. To cross over Starry Swirl and find new worlds. Let’s just do it!’

‘No! No!’ yells everyone.

But Tommy laughs, and cups his hand over his ear, and shrugs, like he can’t hear us any more.

‘Okay,’ he says. ‘You’ve persuaded me. Let’s give it a go, eh?’

‘Well,’ says Mehmet, ‘I suppose so. But I feel bad bad about Earth Family.’

‘They’ll get over it,’ says Dixon, and off they move in their giant boat right up to the edge of Circle of Stones.

It felt kind of shocking to see that silly thing there next to Circle, where none of us were allowed to go.

But then in comes President, the Family Head of Earth, wearing a special President’s wrap with four five big white stars on it done in ash on a square stained blue with starflower juice.

‘Hey! Come back!’ she yells up to them. ‘We don’t want you to do that now. Things are hard hard for us on Earth just now. Every time you take one of those sky-boats out across the stars, we all have to work extra hard to give you the stuff you need to make the Single Force. We haven’t got the time for that now. We’ve got better things to do.’

Mehmet looks at Tommy. Tommy looks at Dixon.

‘Just this once?’ Dixon pleads with the other two. ‘I promise you, it’s what Jesus wants.’

Tommy and Mehmet look at each other.

‘Yeah, just this once,’ they agree, and they carry on right up to Circle, ignoring the President, who shouts up ‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’ in a silly high voice that makes littles laugh.

In comes Small Sky-Boat, which is meant to be Police Veekle. It also has a bark roof and is carried on another set of branches, but it looks even more wobbly and silly than Big Sky-Boat, because it is made to come apart. The real Police Veekle was as big as Landing Veekle, apparently, and it went round and round sky of Earth, looking for problems and trouble. (Sky there was more full of boats than a hundred Greatpools, and in some of them people were doing bad things, like dropping things onto Earth.)

Sitting in the Small Sky-Boat are Angela our mother and Michael Name-Giver. They were called Orbit Police. Angela has her face darkened with clay and buckfat to look like the real Angela.

‘Go after those silly buggers, you two,’ says President, ‘and get them back before they go and lose our boat in Starry Swirl. They really don’t know what they’re doing, and anyway, they’re not doing what Earth Family wants.’